"There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth
are absent."
Leo Tolstoy

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Poverty As Moral Trupitude

As the Harper Conservatives peddle the myth that the Old Age Security program is unsustainable, we should be prepared for the next assault. It comes in the form of Charles Murray's latest book, Coming Apart. Murray, who has been criticizing the welfare state for decades, advances the thesis that our current economic malaise is not about money. It's about morals. The root cause of our problems, Murray argues, is the decline of the traditional family.

Conservatives are very good magicians. They are well versed in the art of creating distractions. Paul Krugman writes that:

. . . the truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have
improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose
ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the
plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the
60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that
traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?

Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class
family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly
and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A
drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated
men.

High school graduates who went to work for GM, Ford or Chrysler used to have it made. Micheal Moore chronicled their story in Roger and Me. Now, Krugman writes:

For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative.
Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates
have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have
collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working
in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down
to 29 percent.

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great
difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow
we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to
participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there
must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals.
And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do
happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do
that.

There is a moral crisis. But it's not the fault of the poor. However, Mr. Harper is targeting precisely those people. It's remarkable how supposedly bright people can put the cart before the horse. Poverty is not caused by poor people.

I'm glad you've written about this; I've been fuming for a couple of weeks!

Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail points out (disingenuously I think) that Murray does not include other than whites just TO SIMPLIFY!!! Considering the US demographics, this is simplification to the absurd.

Interesting too, isn't it, how white middle- class and upper-middle-class values can be the only ones associated with financial security. Reminds me of Alfred Doolittle complaining that he can't get charity because he doesn't share beliefs with the charity-givers. (GBS knew what he was about.)

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.